Category Archives: Ideas - Page 3

Sleep On

Posted by on December 10, 2019 No comments

Last night I was lying in bed having a hard time sleeping.  Sleep is something that has been a little difficult for me lately.  For a while, it was a 2-3 hour event each night.  Then I started taking melatonin and things started getting better, except on weekends, I could sleep 14 or more hours.  So, I don’t know if that’s progress or not.  There’s two issues with my sleep – getting to sleep and staying asleep.  Admittedly, last night was pretty good on the second part, despite being tough on the first.  But anyway, while I was working on making the first part happen, my brain was busy doing dumb things.

I have a sound machine, a LectroFan, which I’ve mentioned here before.  It’s an excellent device that doesn’t suffer from the shortcomings of a lot of other sound machines, which is sampled sound looping awareness.  The LectroFan model I use now is the latest model, which added a couple of new sounds: ocean.  That is the specific reason I bought it and to my disappointment, the sounds were a major letdown.  Essentially, they were a white noise sound fading in and out.  That’s not what surf sounds like at all.

So my brain was trying to figure out how to make a surf sound out of white noise.  Obviously, there’s a lot of different frequencies to a wave crash.  There’s low end rumble and crash, there’s high end hiss, and there’s everything in between.  I was visualizing splitting a sound sample into four (or maybe more) frequency bands and making note of the amplitude level of each band.  You could see when the low frequencies moved in and out, when the high end would come in, and so on.  Then once you had these patterns, you could layer multiple white noise samples over each other, fading between the multiple layers to create a surf sound.

I ended up falling asleep to one of my favorite fan sounds on the LectroFan – a big, low, bassy humming fan.  But while I was actively listening to it, I was also thinking of what would really work for me.  It’s kind of odd and pretty personal, so I can’t imagine it would be a universal sound for a sleep machine.  I would like the sound of traffic on a highway, possibly with or without the sound of an air conditioner.

It’s a weird request.  Its origin comes from motels in my childhood vacation memories.  Those huge AC units that would fill the lower part of the front window and pretty much vibrate the entire room.  And the never-ending sound of traffic on the nearby highway, droning on all night.  I can’t fully explain how the sound of traffic is calming to me.  I’ve thought about it many times over my life and the only thing that really captures my thoughts on it – even though it sounds over-romanticized – is that it’s comforting to me to know the world hasn’t stopped; life is still going on.  Like sometimes, I’ll see an airplane and I’ll think about all the people in that plane – where are they going?  Is it an exciting trip?  Are they glad to be going home?  Going away?  Is it work?  Exciting meeting?  Dreaded meeting?  Boring conference?  So many people in one container, all with different destinations and expectations.  So yeah, I guess the sound of airplanes could also be calming for me.

That would be a weird sleep machine, indeed.

Making It More Difficult, For The Better

Posted by on October 30, 2019 No comments

A little while ago, I saw a post online that was like a little PSA on financial security, which, of course, I am rather big on.  It was warning that PayPal and Venmo were not to be trusted because they were not held to the same security standards as banks.  Both of these sites claim to have “bank-grade” security, but what does that actually mean?

To be honest, I really do trust PayPal.  I haven’t ever had a problem with them or their security.  Then again, I do the maximum I can, enabling 2-factor authentication and having a strong, unique password.  Venmo, I don’t have any history with them, but they are owned by PayPal and from what I can see, they do a lot of the same things.  They also have 2FA, and are very happy to send you email notifications when things happen on their site.

I read this PSA post about distrusting online payment processors with a grain of salt.  The one thing that did strike a nerve with me is the advice: “never link your primary checking account”.  I agree with that.  I follow that pretty religiously with my online bills.  If a payee wants to do an autopay, I’ll allow it only if they allow payment on a credit card.  If they only allow payment by checking account, I use my bank’s bill pay.  Simply defined, I’ll push cash out of my checking account, but no one has the ability to pull cash from the account. 

It sounds convenient to set up my mortgage company to just withdraw my mortgage payment from my checking account monthly, but what if, just what if, they got a bug up their ass, or something went weird, or all hell breaks loose and they decide, we’re going to make your loan payable in full immediately.  And to satisfy this loan, we’re going to make a payment for as much of your balance as possible.  Now, I don’t have $90k sitting in my checking account, but, if they pulled everything they could, it would put a damper on my liquidity.  It’s just not a situation I would like to have happen.  So instead, I schedule a payment from my bank to them once a month.  It ends up working exactly the same.

Of course with online processors, the big fear is getting hacked.  And if your primary account is linked, the hackers can pull all your money just as easily as my mortgage company could.  Even if you have fraud protection, you’re still talking about a big hassle and lost money for a period of time.

The PSA had a poor suggestion to not link your bank account at all, but also had a good suggestion to link a secondary bank account instead.  So that’s what I did.  In PayPal, I had three banking accounts linked, so I removed two.  In Venmo’s website, I began the link to the same account I left active in PayPal.

This is a good thing.  That secondary account only has $15 dollars in it, which becomes my maximum monetary risk in case of being hacked.  But what are the limitations of this?  Well, right now, I couldn’t pay anymore more than $15 unless I transfer more money into the account.  Fortunately for me, like a lot of online banks provide, I have multiple accounts with that bank and I can instantly transfer money between them.  So, there’s no significant time delay on when I can make funds available for payment.  There’s only the delay in having to log in to the bank and transfer the needed money from my main account to my designated “PayPal/Venmo account”.

Still, though, security is always at odds with convenience.  I’m a little more secure now (even more), but I have to do a little more work now.  And note that this inconvenience is only for cash transactions.  Credit card stuff is always protected, so I’ll use that whenever I don’t have to pay the transaction fee.  The PSA also had the questionable advice that paying the 3% fee was worth it for the fraud protection.  Maybe.  But if you can save that fee and still be secure, that’s the best way.

Maybe it’s time to audit all your account links and make sure you don’t have any weak entry points.

A Whim

Posted by on July 17, 2019 No comments

Sometimes, well, maybe more than sometimes, I am prone to impulsiveness.  I’ll get an idea and the more I can justify that idea, through a series of tiny connections, the more likely it is I am going to act on it.  Sometimes, I can stave it off by focusing on the financial aspects of the idea, and other times, it seems the cost isn’t really important or maybe I do more rationalizing of how the cost is justified.  And that is where I’m at today.

This whim is technology-based, so it hits on a few different pleasure points.  It’s a new idea for me, so there’s the novelty of trying it out.  It’s an improvement, so I can justify that it has value.  It supports another of my on-again, off-again obsessions – archival, so there’s indirect benefit as well.

So here’s the idea, which probably won’t make any sense to non-technical people.  I’m going to replace all the hard disks in my computer, and make all the drives virtual.  I’m using some terms very specifically there (and I’ll be inconsistent everywhere else) – I say “disks” to describe the physical hard drives and “drives” to mean the individual drive letters.  Most people have a C:\ drive on their one hard disk.  My system is a bit more complex, for organizational purposes.

Here’s what my computer’s Disk Manager shows.

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I have five hard drives in my computer, one of which is an external USB drive.  What you see in the image is that C: is one hard drive, D: and S: are on another drive, and Y: and L: are paired up on two mirrored drives.  The M: drive is a virtual drive whose file is held on L:.  The B: drive is the external USB.

If you look at the free space of my drives, the M: drive is only 6% free.  This drive holds all my music files, so if you’ve read any of my blog, you would know this space is going to run out soon.  Then there’s other little things that are bothersome.  D: has 95% space free, but I can’t really use it for anything because it’s unmirrored (and thus vulnerable to a drive failure), and also, it’s on another drive anyway.

So, again, here’s the plan.  Get rid of Disk 1, 2, and 3 and replace them with two 8TB mirrored drives.  Right there, that’s nearly 4x my current storage.  Then I could create D:, S:, Y:, and L: all on that mirrored drive.  That would be cool and all, but when it comes to resizing and reorganizing partitions, it can get messy.  For example, taking 100GB from D: and adding some of it to S:, you end up with broken pieces of the drive.

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To avoid this, and be cool and modern in the process, I’ll do with all my drives what I did with the M: drive.  Everything will be its own virtual drive stored on the mirrored disks.  To reiterate, M: is actually a file on the L: drive.  M: is 500GB and L: has a 500GB file on it.  With my new design, I’ll have one massive 8TB drive, with five large files on it, one for the D: drive, one for the S: drive, etc.

What’s that gain me?  In the case of Disk 1, shown above, it would just be one partition, D:.  S: would be on a totally different disk, say Disk 5.  The drive will always consume 100% of the disk it is on – no sharing or splitting.  So when I expand or shrink the virtual disk, it will always be 100% consumed by the drive.  The change in free space will be reflected in the 8TB drive hosting the file.

What else do I get out of it?  Well, I don’t have to use up the 8TB right away.  I can build a temporary drive for whatever purpose and destroy it when I’m done with it.  That’s kind of the way things are here at my workplace.  We have a massive drive array and whenever we need a new server, we just carve out some drive space and make a new server.  It’s one step closer to me having a entirely virtualized network.  Also, by not using up all the space at once, I can grow the individual drives as they need it.  I don’t have to try and anticipate how much I’ll be using.

Looking back in history, the last time I discussed my computer storage was over five years ago.  So that’s actually a really good run for the 2TB drives I’m using now.  It’s one more bit of justification for me to indulge my whim.

So, You Want To Work Here

Posted by on June 26, 2019 No comments

My current activity in job seeking has gotten me thinking about the interview process.  It’s something I’ve written about before – in anger – but my recent thoughts have been more antagonistic.  These would be more suited for a prank skit, since you just couldn’t get away with jokes like these in a real situation.

My first idea, which has a slight bit of validity, is to give a coding challenge that has a task to be accomplished, but the results don’t have any bearing on the required task.  For example:

Write a small application that tests a number to see whether or not it is a prime number, then output that number to the screen.  Use values 1 through 50.

The candidate would probably be confused, because as requested, the output would be a list of numbers from 1 to 50, with no indication of whether each is a prime or not.  That’s exactly the point.  Two things would need to be verified: that the output only had numbers 1-50, and that the code to check if the number is a prime does exist.

What this could establish is how the developer deals with odd requests.  Are they going to fight you and say the prime test is irrelevant (which it seems to be)?  Are they going to skip it and output 1-50 and expect that the end justifies the means?  You could learn a lot about an employee this way.  After the arguments, you could say that there is an actual reason for the test, like you have to measure CPU usage in a standardized way and the prime calculation provides that.

The other idea I had was to use a really offensive statement as industry jargon and then act disappointed when the candidate doesn’t seem to understand it.

“Ok, then.  So, do you shave your balls?”

“Excuse me?”

“When you’re done coding, do you shave your balls?”

“I’m not sure I can answer that.”

“Sigh.  When your code is all done and working, you go back and clean up the whitespace and format it all nicely.  You know… shave your balls.”

“Oh.  I do clean my code up afterwards, yes.”

*shakes head and writes down a brief note*  “Very well, then.”

“I’d never heard that term before.”

“I see.  Well, moving on.  When in the coding process would you say it’s time to stick a dick in it?”

Female candidates would be especially fun to deal with.

Where To Go, What To Do?

Posted by on May 29, 2019 No comments

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/amazon-to-unleash-a-long-feared-purge-of-small-suppliers/ar-AAC1xhQ

For me, it’s the growing dawn of a new realization.  It’s not really anything revelatory; it’s a topic that has been bantered around for years.  Essentially, the thought is, Amazon is getting too big and too powerful, much like Walmart was before.

It sure is easy to be addicted to quick shipping, which is what Amazon is very good at.  I was disappointed by an online order from Lowes that took a week to arrive, and an item I ordered on Ebay just the other day is going to take a week to arrive (shipped from Canada, so, ok…).  Some other things, I’ve ordered recently have also taken time to arrive, like a new kitchen sink, or lights, or CDs.

But notice something, all of these items were not purchased from Amazon.  That realization is somewhat important to me.  Amazon is not the one-stop, end-all, be-all shopping destination for me.  And, with recent news like this, I feel I should wean myself from Amazon’s grasp further.

It’s not all bad.  There’s a lot of things that don’t need to be received in a couple of days (and there are some that do).  There are times I’ll use Amazon’s no-rush shipping option, and never claim the little reward they offer for doing so.  Price-wise, other places can be competitive and sometimes even much better.  Home Depot beat out Amazon by almost 50% on one item I needed.  When it comes to selection, not even Amazon can match a specialized online store, especially when it comes to furniture and other home goods.  And in a lot of those cases, Amazon’s selection is only much broader because they have a massive selection of cheap import products.  If that’s ok with you, EBay can be just as fruitful.

I’ll admit, sometimes, I find what I’m looking for on another site and will check it against Amazon.  If Amazon is close in price, I’ll usually order it from Amazon.  This is solely because I don’t want to have to go through the hassle of creating a new account on a new site.  But, with my planned dependency-reduction, I may begin doing so to spread the wealth a bit further.  For some people, this might not be as feasible, because if you are reusing your email address on many sites, you are increasing your risk of having your email harvested for spam.  Since I use a different email address for every site, I don’t have this worry.

This reliance on Amazon for a lot of things is sort of a downward spiral.  As we buy more stuff online, stores make fewer items available to purchase in-store, which forces us to buy more online.  I wish there was a way we could reverse it.  Some places have an in-stock check, like Lowes, Home Depot, and Staples for example.  So you can check to see if an item is there before driving to the store.  And if it’s not in stock, well, would you order it from there to be shipped or held for pickup, or would you just return to Amazon to buy it?  I know I’m going to have to be more proactive in that choice.

Why can’t someone with more business connections than I have make a website that tracks who sells what.  This should be easy as hell.  Any store that has an electronic point of sale system must have a list of products they sell, and that list of products would contain a UPC.  It should be trivial to upload a list of UPCs to a website to indicate what products your store sells.  The website allows someone to search by product and a list of who sells that product is displayed.  It could work the other way too, where manufacturers upload a list of UPCs and the retailers they distribute to.  The data is there, it just needs aggregated.

But, Is It Art?

Posted by on May 14, 2019 No comments

I’ve started an art project, which is usually bad because I am not good at art.  To forego any buildup and drama and suspense, the project is painting my couch.

You might have an image in your head of an early 1900’s couch with velvet cushioning and a painted wood frame, but that’s not it.  I have a modern couch, entirely wrapped in white vinyl, no wood.  And now you may have some confusion.  Painting your couch?  Yes, did you know you can paint vinyl?  Vinyl is just plastic and you can buy paints for plastic, Krylon being one well known brand.

My couch is nearly 15 years old.  It’s probably due for replacement, actually.  As I said, it is white, but that white is not as white as it used to be.  It’s that sad kind of off-white now, with some stains that refuse to come out.  The original idea for painting came as an outgrowth of an idea I had that maybe I could dye the vinyl bright white again.  Do they make white dye?  I don’t think I ever got a good answer to that, and I stumbled on articles talking about painting vinyl furniture.  So that’s where I am.

They do have white vinyl paint, but I figured if I was going to fuck something up, I should at least fuck it up in a bold way.  So I decided to change the couch to grey, which is another common vinyl paint color.  The paints I was buying were intended for car upholstery and dashboards.  I guess if you want durability, a car seat is going to take a pretty big beating, so this paint should be pretty solid.

The paint isn’t available for store purchase, so I had to order it to be shipped to a store.  Home Depot was probably about 50% the cost of Amazon (really).  I bought a 6pk of spray cans, not just so I would be sure to have enough, but because that’s the only cost-effective way to buy them.  The paint showed up in about a week and I brought them home and got ready to fuck it all up.

I made a shitty little paint booth in my garage, which just means I draped a sheet over things I didn’t want painted and stuck some fans in the windows to pull out the fumes.  I took one of the cushions off the couch, wiped it down with some degreaser, and set it on my little painting pedestal.  Ok.  There’s no ctrl-z on this, let’s hope it goes well.

I sprayed the paint on and immediately noticed it was actually kind of a brownish color.  This better work out.  I tried to keep in mind the tips I’d read in the articles I’d read.  Try for multiple light coats.  But, I do suck at painting of any type, so at the end when I surveyed my results, I was underwhelmed.  Hopefully it would dry better…

After a little while, I came back and checked on it.  While the color really did turn out grey and not brown, the coverage would be what I would call blotchy.  Definitely not uniform.  And that was even after I tried to even out spots that seemed too light the first time.  Some of it seemed to be caused by the “grain”, as if there is a grain to vinyl.  But what’s done is done.  I have to keep going now.

And that’s a little problem.  Just that one cushion used up almost three cans of paint.  I have another cushion at least as big as that one, plus two frames that have to have at least twice as much surface area.  That night, I immediately ordered a second case of paint.  I might need to buy a third, too.  That would put my art project budget at around $135.  Granted, that’s nowhere near the price of a new sofa, but based on the results of my first cushion, if I don’t level up my painting skills as I go, this is going to end up pretty embarrassing.  Well, I’m sure a thrift store could use a new donation.

Back inside, I removed the legs from one section of the frame and a realization came over me.  I think my couch is handmade.  The couch was not purchased at a large retailer, it was from a tiny retailer that specialized in modern design furniture.  I think they built the couch themselves or maybe bought it from a builder.  The first thing that struck me was that the legs were held on with drywall screws, not wood screws.  Then, while I had the couch on its side, I wondered where the little tag was: “UNDER PENALTY OF LAW, NOT TO BE REMOVED BLAH BLAH”.  There was none, which is concerning when you know why that tag is required.  It’s there to guarantee to the buyer that the cushion and filler are made of all new material, not reused materials.  And not only that tag was non-present, there was no other indication that the couch was made by a company.  No stamps, labels, tags, nothing.

So you can take that however you want.  Either I have a custom, handmade, one-of-a-kind couch which is really awesome, or I have a handmade, one-of-a-kind couch that is seriously sketchy.  “Nice couch, what brand is that?”  “No idea.”

The next day, I hauled one half of the couch frame out for painting.  I managed to complete an entire coat with most of one spray can left, so it’s possible I can do the whole couch for two cases of paint.  On the plus side, my technique did get a little better.  Even so, you can’t mistake there’s something “off” about the final result.  It’s probably good enough for a staging picture, but when you get closer, it becomes more obvious.  Oh well, I’m going to take this project to the end and the couch will serve me well for a couple more years or whenever I decide I really want something different.

Halfway done; before and after:

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And here, fully complete:

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The New Retail

Posted by on May 6, 2019 No comments

Here’s one of the ideas that could be extremely lucrative until the tide changes and the master takes control.  By that I’m referring to cases where the market fills a need until the need is fulfilled natively.  For example, a lot of add-ons, plug-ins, and utilities are written to work around shortcomings of software apps, either online or otherwise.  This is great, until the application developer writes the functionality into the main program, making all the plug-ins unnecessary.  The plug-in writers lose a potential large chunk of customers and if they aren’t on to the next big thing, they’re out of business.

My idea is one of those things that is probably going to be inevitable, so it’s really a matter of how quickly can someone implement this and can they bank enough and have a solid enough exit strategy to not lose it all when the hammer falls.  And I’m talking about an Amazon-sized hammer.

Enough teasing.  This is the idea: Create a showroom for Amazon products and provide ordering stations that use Amazon’s affiliate program to gain revenue.

So what does this take?  Lots of space and either enough money to buy floor samples or a really good salesperson to convince manufacturers to provide a free floor model for promotion.  Considering the current retail apocalypse, space is easy to come by.  But, I’m going to predict, Amazon is going to eventually do this themselves and no one is going to compete at the scale of which they are capable.

But let’s give some consideration to the idea in general.  We know that retail is dying and most all sales are moving online.  But there are some products that you really want to see and touch and experience before you purchase them.  Furniture is a strong example.  Appliances can also be in that category.  These are large purchases.  But to a lesser degree, electronics are also something people want to see in action.

What happens now is people go to a retailer and get their touchy-feely on, then go to Amazon and buy it for less, screwing the retailer.  So then, let’s just eliminate the retailer and use their space for what it was used for anyway – showrooming.  Wipe out all their back-room space for stock and open it up for more display.  Also, invite manufacturer representatives.  Schedule demonstrations.  Or even better, take it to the next level.

Schedule shootout demos.  Have three or more competing products and have a representative pitch their product to a crowd.  It’s totally different when you’re at a store that specializes in one brand; there’s no competition.  But put against each other, there has to be a more honest product placement strategy.  It’s not a battle royale with one winner.  It’s a legitimate selling point to say your vacuum cleaner doesn’t have the power of a Dyson because maybe you only have two rooms of carpet.  So why spend so much on a tool that would be used so little?  Record the show and put it on a video channel.

But, I digress.  This concept is about creating a showroom to sell Amazon products.  Now to make the money.  Every product would have a digital sign which would display the current price, availability, and a QR code to place an order.  The QR code would contain an affiliate code so the showroom gets a small portion of the sale.  There could also be kiosks around the store to place orders or look up more information on larger screens.

And that’s the income concept in a nutshell.  Maybe you could sell off floor models when they get discontinued for some extra income.  Maybe manufacturers would pay you to have a premium display.  So what would the expenses be?  Rent, utilities, a small amount of labor, typical things like insurance and licenses.  But rent would be the biggest expense.  Now, how much would you need to sell to make enough affiliate income to cover all those expenses?  Well, I don’t know.  I didn’t do any research to see if this idea was even feasible.  It’s just an idea.

And feasible or not, it’s only a matter of time before Amazon decides to do it themselves.  They could buy an entire mall and turn it into a massive showroom for their products, plus a Whole Foods.  They would have the clout to negotiate free samples from manufacturers, or just use customer returns.  They have the means to create closeout, as-is centers in their showrooms to sell off excess inventory.

Maybe the future of retail is stockless.  You never walk out with anything, it always gets shipped to you.

The MegaBenno

Posted by on March 15, 2019 No comments

I’ve had a plan for a long time to display my CD collection in a large shelving rack.  When I last had my CDs organized, they were in rotating towers.  First one tower, then a larger one, then, because of growth, both towers at the same time.  I currently have about 1500 CDs and I should be planning for many more.

Early in my collecting days, I used the Ikea Benno shelves.  I still have the three that I used (capacity 540, for reference).  I still think they are the best for display and storage, so I gave consideration to getting more.  Now, the Benno is called Gnedby, but most Ikea fans know both names.

Because I would be having so many towers to hold my large collection, I studied the hack to eliminate one of the side panels to reclaim some horizontal space.  The result of the hack was pretty good, but the more I considered it, I was still turned off by having a grid of squares repeating over and over.  The Benno was designed to be a vertical storage unit, which is how I laid it out when I used it.  A-Z from top to bottom in the first tower, then top to bottom in the second tower and on and on.  That’s not how I wanted my new shelves to be.  I wanted a horizontal orientation.

My first idea was to stack the Bennos horizontally, which has been done already in the Ikea Hacks archive.  That’s ok, but you still have the issue of doubled side panels.  So I considered a means of stacking the Bennos and only using one side panel between each tier.  I designed it to use short legs that would keep it up off the ground.  My sketch was something like:

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The problem with this is that I would have to buy 10 towers and I would end up with a bunch of leftover side panels.  So I reconsidered the design.  What if I used side panels for the sides and side panels as the shelves.  That eliminates the two vertical end pieces, which can then be repurposed as center vertical pieces.  That works out to 7 towers, a savings of $150.

My original design was for 10 shelves – 10 Bennos stacked on top of each other.  However, if I’m using the side panels as designed, a Benno has 12 shelves per tower.  That’s a CD capacity increase from 1,800 to 2,160.  That’s almost an extra year of growth at my current pace.  However, that now requires 8 towers, so that’s an extra $50.  With shipping and taxes, the whole purchase was $468.

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The first step after unpacking all the Bennos is converting side panels to shelves.  This is accomplished by sawing off the base of the side panel where the floor trim cutout is.  This needs to be done on all but two side panels.  When we’re done, one of the cut off bases will be used in the center for support.

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The next thing I did was lay out the two side panels and position the bottom shelf.  I drilled some holes from the inside out for the bottom shelf, then screwed the shelf to the side panels.  Then I drilled holes and attached the center support to the bottom shelf.

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When I attached the center support, I planned to have one screw up from the bottom and another down from the top of each shelf.  So I attached the shelf’s bottom screw first, then once the shelves are attached to the side panels, the screw down from the top will be attached.  This is a cross section of five shelves.

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I brought in a group of shelves and center supports and attached the center supports to each (one screw from the bottom).  With enough shelves to fill up half the unit, I marked which holes I would need to drill out to fasten each shelf to the side panels.

The next step is drilling holes through the side panels for each shelf.  These don’t have to be large holes, just large enough so the wood won’t crack when putting screws through.

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For the shelf that will be on the bottom, take one of the cut off bases from the shelves and position it where the center support will be.  Screw the base to the bottom shelf for support between the bottom shelf and the floor.

The fastening of the center supports is a little convoluted because we’ve eliminated the two side panels in favor of one.  So where normally, each shelf panel would screw into the center support, we have to connect each vertical support to the upper and lower shelf.  Screw the front of each shelf up into the center support and the back of each shelf down into the lower center support.  You can use the included Ikea screws for this.  Finally, attach the side panels to the twelve shelves.  The holes have already been drilled, so it’s just a matter of lining up the shelves with the holes.  You should have enough Ikea screws to get through this as well.

Stand the shelf up and attach the backing.  Because some shelves with be left hand panels and some will be right hand, you can attach the backing in a louver fashion either upper or lower facing.

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Then the fun part, filling the shelving.  The whole purpose of wanting to have horizontal shelves is so the collection goes from A-Z from left to right, top to bottom.  One of the appealing design considerations for organizing this way is something I saw in a picture of someone else’s collection.  That element was having small letters indicating the alphabetical progression through the collection.  My research has shown that really nice crafted letters to divide the collection are not cheap.  Cheap if you want your initials.  Not cheap if you want the whole alphabet.  While I was disappointed by that, I pondered how else I could have alphabetical dividers in my collection.  One idea that came to me was alphabet blocks.  But I think the bright multi-colors would be too whimsical.  I found a modern set of blocks, but beyond their size being too small, 1.5”, they were also $85.

My solution was to repurpose all the shelves that would not get used with my redesign.  I could glue two together for visual weight, then stick a large letter sticker on the front.  Alphabet stickers can be bought in any craft shop for very little money.  Less than a single fancy letter figure.

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Hooking Up With A Previous Love

Posted by on September 16, 2018 No comments

A recurring story on my blog is my relationship troubles with iced tea.  Maybe it deserves its own tag at this point.  To quickly recap, I had a very long relationship with Nestea mix, but it changed, so we had to break up.  I rebounded with Publix mix before settling down with Lipton, who was very good to me for a long time.  Then one day, Nestea completely disappeared and while that was a little upsetting, I found Te Bustelo, which made me dump Lipton immediately. Man, that makes me sound like a horrible person.

As in other relationships, the fickle one gets their due, and Te Bustelo ended production, leaving me a widower.  I had purchased a case of the mix – the last available – to get me through the next couple of years.  Well, it’s been almost three years now and I’m down to probably a few last servings in my last container.  I was probably avoiding the looming reality by not attempting to find a replacement.  Still mourning, maybe?  Today, I finally sucked it up and decided to find out what my options are.  Off to Amazon, source of everything.

Searching for iced tea mix, I got results dominated by Lipton, with a few other brands scattered here and there.  One of those brands was Nestea (trying to avoid eye contact).  You know, maybe I wasn’t completely with my head in the sand about my future tea product because at one point I did consider buying unsweetened tea mix and adding my own sugar.  And you know, Nestea does make an unsweetened mix…

This is what Nestea looks like today, the same it’s looked for many, many years.

Nestea Sweet Mix Iced Tea, 45.1 oz

As I’m working through the results, I see this.

Nestea Sweet Iced Tea Lemon Mix 90.3 Oz

Whoa, what is that?  That is a different package with a different logo.  And another thing – I am extremely sensitive to names, because of my trauma from “sugar sweetened tea mix” morphing to “sweet tea mix”.  This canister says “sweet iced tea mix”.  That is different.  That must mean it is different.  I click the link and look at the ingredient list on the package.

Sugar, Citric Acid, Instant Tea, Maltodextrin, Tricalcium Phosphate (prevents caking), Natural Lemon Flavor

Oh my god.  This mix changes out Sucralose with Tricalcium Phosphate, in the same way Sweet Tea Mix changed Fructose with Sucralose.  If I haven’t used the word enough yet, let me try some more.  Sucralose is why I had to stop drinking Nestea in the first place. It’s an artificial sweetener that hurts my stomach. Suckralose.

I actually couldn’t handle this revelation at the time, bordering between excitement and disbelief, so I return to my search results.  I scroll a little further down and I see this.

Nestea Original Canadian Lemon Iced Tea Mix Jumbo Can 2.2kg 122 Servings Imported from Canada

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON, HERE?  I click this item and look at its ingredient list.

Sugar, Citric Acid, Instant Tea, Natural Flavour, Silicon Dioxide

This mix, I read, is the Canadian version of Nestea, named “Original Lemon Iced Tea”.  A second Nestea mix with no sucralose.  Where the hell has this stuff been for all these years? (Canada, apparently.)  And while I have no regrets over my special time with Te Bustelo, maybe it’s a sign that I should get back, even if it’s with the exotic, foreign cousin of my original love.

Still reeling a little from this sudden discovery, I make a fairly dumb decision to buy both of these items right away.  They’re not exactly cheap, since one is a giant container and the other is a giant container imported from a foreign country.  So, $60 in tea will be at my house on Tuesday so I can then see if there is still a spark between us.

Hope springs eternal.

From The New To The Old

Posted by on September 7, 2018 1 comment

Looking back, the last couple of years has been actually a pretty big upheaval in my media consumption world.  Starting it off, on Black Thursday in 2016, I got televisions.  For ages, I had an old tube TV I never watched.  And that was interesting for a while.  I never did much with it.

A few months later after getting these TVs, I got a game system – a Wii.  Snicker all you want, but it was, and occasionally still is, fun.  If nothing else, it gave the TV a reason to exist.  A few months after that, I bought a couple of Roku sticks, which I plugged into the TV, giving the TV more reason to exist.  Finally, this year, I implemented the Plex server on my network, so I can stream music to the Rokus that are on the TVs.  And all this time, I’ve had a old home theater system with a 5-disc DVD changer and VCR, with 5.1 speakers.

Despite having all this possibility, things are kind of a mess.  The biggest problem is the sound system.  If I watch the Roku or listen to Plex through the Roku, I can only get sound through the TV speakers.  If I watch a DVD, I have to mute the TV speakers because it doubles the HT 5.1 system.  If I play the Wii, I have to turn on the HT system and mute the TV.

The root problem is that the TV needs to be the center hub of all video and audio and the audio from the TV needs to be routed to the HT system.  Because the HT system is downstream from the TV, if the HT system is serving audio and video back to the TV, it will short circuit the audio path and playback will perform as expected.

So, evaluating my options, I have two older components that need integrated with a newer component.  In this case, the TV will be the hub for audio and video, but the Wii and the HT system are only analog.  This affects the signal path in two places.  I only have one analog input to my TV, so either the Wii or the HT system will have to have the signal converted from component (RCA) to HDMI.  Then, the only audio output from the TV is digital optical, so I need another conversion from optical (SPDIF) to RCA.  Upconverting one direction and downconverting the other.  Ridiculous.

Finally, I’m not entirely sure the digital output from the TV will be unmixed, meaning that if I turn the TV speakers off, or mute them or turn down the volume, will the digital signal still be sent or will it be muted?

The optimistic end result is that audio from all sources: Roku/Plex, Wii, and DVD will all go through the HT speaker system’s Aux input.  When a DVD is played, the HT system will still play through the speakers and when the DVD is not played, it should return to Aux.  Maybe I’ll have to change the input on the HT remote.

Fortunately, the converters aren’t very expensive, less than $15 each.  Here’s to hoping it all works…